Kenny Knight

 
The day moves on, night is pulling it.
I take your hand and we walk
from the Bagatelle to the supermarket,
from the supermarket to the red forty three.
I’m carrying your shopping bags
forty years after carrying your homework home
from school.
 
The house is dark where we sleep
and our bodies
are passed from one dream to the next
down a long tunnel of cinematic arms.
How gentle these women are
who shelter us,
babysitters from the fall of day
to the rising of brown eyes staring into blue.
 
The sun shines even at night,
I can see it shining on the moon’s empty beaches.
 
You’re singing down the telephone,
the nine lives of love songs
we sing in separation.
 
Would you miss me
if I was on another landscape?
 
Moving from the court of Queen Log
I sleepwalk to the living room light switch
in twenty seconds
I’m somewhere on the map of Plymouth,
moving quietly above an alphabet of streets.
 
The night comes alive,
the language of alcohol spills like an old song,
 
an a cappella cover.
The age-old echoes of slurred speech
reminds me of the buzz
I’m no longer a part of;
the poetry that is Saturday night.
 
I shuffle in colour coordinated pyjamas,
following the signpost towards the kitchen.
 
I drop a pyramid teabag into a fifty year old mug
and think about Mister Habib,
who came all the way from Egypt
to stitch my blue eye with silver thread.
 
Across the courtyard a neighbourhood owl
sits passively at three o’clock in the morning,
socialising with a cop movie.
 
I can hear the sirens of real life and fiction
on the streets of New York,
on the streets of the twin cities,
on the streets of my hometown, crowded with revellers
who’ve just awoken me from a conversation
I was having with my girlfriend.
Now she’s not talking to me in her sleep.
 
The house is dark where we sleepwalk.
The house is five miles from my hometown
and two hundred and fifty miles from yours.
Honicknowle twinned with Hatfield.
 
Tonight the rain falls as I fell
for your brown hair, brown eyes and freckles.
 
Tonight the Queen of Loneliness isn’t your maiden name.